This week I have experienced increasing pain in my bottom, or to be more precise, just inside my anus area. This discomfort increased to a maximum on Friday when I didn’t know what to do with myself. The discomfort is now decreasing daily but still enough for me to lose some sleep over. When you are in severe pain you get anxious about it as there is little to do or understand why it is happening. It’s also a little embarrassing to have to explain your problem to a doctor, especially in a foreign country. During my lost sleep hours I have developed a theory which may explain my discomfort.
Fart theory
During the normal digestion process some gas is produced, mainly methane which will tend to gather in certain places to form bubbles. There must be favourite places where these bubbles collect before moving on and out of the system. Not so much favourite places but natural spaces that are better suited to gas collection than in others. These bubbles would move through the intestines slowly until they eventually find themselves escaping in the normal way. There must be quite a large space somewhere near the anus for this waste gas to accumulate because it is possible to control its release until a more suitable or appropriate time, especially when surrounded by other people. Sometimes it is necessary to hold this for considerable time when in others company for lengthy periods; I especially notice it when attending an Open University Summer school where you are in company all day and rarely alone even when walking to lunch. This can cause much discomfort and even regular trips to the toilet seem inadequate to relieve your discomfort.Diving complications
Liquid and solids don’t compress very much under pressure whilst air or gas does. If you go snorkelling you take a deep breath at the surface and swim down to the bottom to explore while holding your breath until you need a new one and swimming back up again to replace it. This does not cause a problem as your lungs fill with air at the surface; the volume decreases when you swim down but when you come back up they increase to their normal capacity. Water is very much denser and heavier than air so even when you only go down a few meters it is necessary to equalise the pressure of any air pockets you have in your body such as in your nose, sinuses and lungs. As you swim down, you have to hold your nose and blow against it until your ears pop and the pressure is equalised again. You find it necessary to do this every meter or so to avoid discomfort. When scuba diving it is possible to go much deeper than snorkelling as you take compressed air with you so you don’t have to keep coming to the surface. Your regulator delivers air to you at the same pressure as your surroundings so at the surface it will be delivered at 1 bar (normal air pressure at sea lever). If you submerge to a depth of 10 meters or 33ft it will deliver air at 2 bar twice that at the surface. If you submerge to 20 meters or 66ft the pressure will be delivered at 3 bar etc. Consequently you use more air the deeper you go. If you have enough air to last an hour at the surface breathing normally, this same tank will only last 20 minutes at 20 meters deep. If you fill a balloon at the surface, tie the end and take it down to 10 meters its size will reduce to half what it was when you filled it and when you return to the surface it increase back to its full size. Alternatively, if you took the empty balloon down 10 meters then filled it with air from your regulator or blew it up with your lungs, tie the end and return to the surface, the balloon would get bigger and bigger until it burst on the way back up as its volume increased. For this reason, the most important rule for scuba divers are, “always keep breathing; never hold your breath”. If you were to take a breath from you tank 20 meters down, hold your breath and ascend whilst holding your breath, your lungs would increase in size by 3 times their volume when you took your breath and cause you serious injury or death.
My situation
I suffer a little from flatulence, especially in the morning. I started my scuba diving lessons in the morning and you are with people for about 3 hours, most of which you are in the water so it wouldn’t matter if you passed wind. However, subconsciously you don’t normally do this in company even if they would never know. Also your wet suit is like another skin and it is almost impossible to pass wind in it at the surface, never mind under water. My discomfort increased throughout the week until it was at its worst Friday which was my last day of training and we did our deepest dive of 20 meters. When we descended for our deep dive we went straight down using our BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) rather than swim down along the bottom as normal. We had to go slowly equalising the pressure in our nose on the way until we reached the bottom and did several exercises or “skills” as they call them. Before we could do this, I had a problem; my mask had almost filled with water on my decent and was over one of my eyes. The standard practise in this situation is to look up, press the top of your mask on your forehead, slightly lifting the bottom of your mask at the bottom whilst blowing out sharply through your nose. This should blow the water out of your mask replacing it with air. We had already trained for this in shallow water and I didn’t do very well at it. In fact I somehow managed to choke the first time I tried it and surfaced being sick and coughing like crazy. I was terrified that we would have to repeat it at depth because I would have choked before reaching the surface. Luckily I somehow managed to clear my mask enough to see without choking but it took great effort and caused huge anxiety; it looks a long way to the surface when you are down there.
As I said before, we stayed at the bottom doing exercises like taking our kit of and replacing it etc. for some 20 minutes before resurfacing straight up with a controlled ascent. I think that my gas had built up throughout my intestines and my final chamber was quite full before our dive. When we went down, this chamber would have decreased in size to one third its original size leaving plenty of space for more gas to filer into it. After 20 minutes of anxiety and exercises my chamber had filled again so by the time we resurfaced would increase to 3 times the size it was at the bottom (excuse the pun). This probably caused swelling or rupturing of that area causing me the discomfort and pain.
Conclusions
They should make the second rule of scuba diving, “never hold your farts”. Learn from my mistakes; never have eggs and beans for breakfast on the day you go diving.
The human brain never ceases to amaze me; just by thinking about things, even the most bizarre of situations can be better understood by the power of though alone. By understanding my situation I am less worried about it now even though I may be completely wrong and I have something else like common piles.
I passed my PADI exam! I think I blew 'em out of the water.
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